Monzo Founder Joins $10.5M Fundraise for UK’s Robin AI’s Legal Tech

Robin AI has raised $10.5 million for its legal industry-focused artificial intelligence (AI) tool.

The U.K. company announced the Series A funding Monday (Feb. 27), saying it would help the company develop its technology team and acquire new customers.

“There’s no doubt that AI is exploding,” the company said in a news release. New technologies that push the boundaries of what is possible always bring questions of both safety and commercial viability.”

The funding round was led by venture capital firm Plural, with participation from Episode 1 and a cohort of angel investors, including Tom Blomfield, former CEO of digital bank Monzo.

Robin AI says its machine learning model is trained using proprietary data from 4.5 million legal documents. It lets users draft and negotiate contracts 60% to 80% faster, adding up to 75% savings on legal fees.

“These savings are enabled by our unique ‘SaaS + services’ business model, which combines a ‘lawyer-in-the-loop’ with the latest machine learning technology and the integration of the latest models from Anthropic,” the company said, referring to the AI research and safety company.

The funding round is happening at a time when “the world is entering a new age of generative AI, and there’s no going back,” as PYMNTS wrote earlier this month.

That’s despite the fact that a botched demonstration of this next-generation AI technology managed to knock off $100 billion in value from a company such as Google parent Alphabet’s market cap when the tech mammoth’s new “smarter AI” chatbot, Bard, shared inaccurate information in response to a query.

“That’s how high expectations around the emergent machine-learning tool are,” PYMNTS wrote.

Technical innovations backed by generative AI have quickly gained prominence in the marketplace following the almost overnight success of OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT, in which Alphabet competitor Microsoft has invested billions. And industry observers have pointed out that Microsoft’s advances in deploying the future-fit AI technology across its software suite may have been what forced Alphabet to rush Bard to market.

“Entrenched blue-chip tech giants, whose business valuations have been hammered over the past year, are now turning to generative AI as a way to reclaim both their innovation accolades and the high-growth valuations that bleeding-edge organizations tend to command,” PYMNTS wrote.

Also this month, Bain & Company and OpenAI formed a global services alliance to facilitate a “huge wave of innovation” around AI.

The partnership combines Bain & Company’s digital implementation capabilities and strategic expertise and OpenAI’s AI tools and platforms to help clients realize the value of the technology, with potential use cases including AI-developed ad copy for marketers and generating digital communication for financial advisers.

“AI has reached an inflection point and we foresee a huge wave of change and innovation for our clients across industries,” Bain & Company Worldwide Managing Partner Manny Maceda said at the time.